Authomatic radiometric correction of Landsat TM imagery through pseudoinvariant areas and modtran modeling

This paper describes a novel methodology to automatically estimate the atmospheric parameters needed in simplified radiometric correction model (atmospheric and topographic) of remotely sensed solar bands. The method uses the estimated radiance received by the sensor from an area where only atmospheric contribution exists (La), as the atmospheric optical depth (Ù0) in pseudoinvariant areas (PIA) with known reflectance values. PIA were obtained using TERRA MODIS images and were verified with Landsat imagery. Results for 18 Landsat 5 TM images show that differences between estimated reflectance and the reference value for 3000 test PIA are very low and consistent, varying from -2% to +2% in reflectance.